His hands, ablaze with jewelled rings, were folded across the ends of the tie, his chin sunk on his breast; and under the hyacinthine, heavily-curling hair, the brooding face was so magnificently handsome as to be beautiful.

"Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night which they embroidered, and, raising themselves toward the light, allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge into the chiaroscuro of the surface where their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful, frothy undulations of their ostrich-feather fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves."--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 44 of the Modern Library paperback edition